Blood Moon — K. Patrick Conner

Rancho Esquon was a quiet little community in Northern California's vast Sacramento Valley. With its green neon palm, the Oasis Diner attracted tired truckers passing through on the long stretch of highway. The downtown movie theater was open only on Friday and Saturday nights to show films in Spanish to the migrant farm workers. And a small airstrip on the outskirts of town serviced crop dusters and private pilots who gave flying lessons to bored ranchers' wives.

Then one blustery afternoon Michael Morrissey's Cessna Skyhawk plummeted to the runway in a blaze of sparks, and Rancho Esquon would never be the same. Donny Cannon knew Morrissey wasn't going to make it when he pulled him out of the plane's wreckage. But it wasn't the crash that took his best friend's life -- Morrissey had been shot.

Now Cannon is hell-bent to find out who killed him and why. Together with Michael's sister -- a sultry dark-eyed beauty who wants to find the answers for quite a different reason -- Cannon follows a twisting trail that leads him to the murky drug underworld that lurks beneath the valley's pastoral surface.

Soon the tranquility of Rancho Esquon is shattered by corruption, violence and brutal murder ... and Donny Cannon, always a loner, is more alone than ever as he fights to save his own life.

A taut, lean, sexy thriller, Blood Moon marks the debut of an exciting new talent in the suspense genre.